Linda Chavez: Right wing works with strange bedfellows

As conservatives debate what to do about
immigration reform in the wake of the GOP’s disastrous showing among Hispanic
voters in the 2012 presidential election, they might consider that the groups
they’ve allied themselves with to date are strange bedfellows.

I’ve been writing for years about the
odd history of anti-immigration groups — and they are anti-immigration, not
just anti-illegal immigration.

Groups like the Federation for American
Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, and others
have little in common with conservatives. Now, a new and comprehensive analysis
of these organizations details why conservatives should be uncomfortable with
the company they keep.

Author Mario Lopez, writing in the fall
issue of Human Life Review, traces the modern anti-immigration groups back to
their roots in the population control movement, and their predecessors’ ties to
the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. While some of this evidence
has been known and documented before, Lopez does a much more thorough job than
any previous attempt to lay out the facts, interconnections and questionable
background of FAIR, CIS, NumbersUSA and their affiliated groups.

What Lopez shows in his article,
“Hijacking Immigration,” should be disturbing to conservatives. He demonstrates
that what motivates these groups primarily is their obsession with controlling
population. In essence, they want to restrict immigration to keep population
size down in the U.S., eventually decreasing it to between 150,000,000 and
200,000,000.

The organizers of these groups and some
of their current backers are pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia and assisted suicide,
and have spoken approvingly of China’s one child policy. In their view, there
are simply too many people in the U.S. (and the world) and they’d like fewer of
them — a lot fewer. They hit on restricting immigration as the first line of
attack in their war on population, but there is no indication they want to stop
there.

As Lopez is quick to point out,
population growth is not the enemy — indeed it is the source of human
innovation and prosperity. These neo-Malthusian groups have been proven wrong
again and again by history. The growth in the human population has been
accompanied by an even greater growth in wealth and a better standard of living
for all the world’s populations. The price of commodities, which the
neo-Malthusians warned would become scarcer, has actually declined in real
dollars, which suggests human ingenuity trumps scarcity.

But what should be most troubling to
anti-abortion conservatives is the close association between FAIR and the
pro-abortion movement. Lopez notes that several members of FAIR’s staff, board,
advisors and donors are closely tied to abortion rights. FAIR, CIS, and
NumbersUSA were creations of one man, John Tanton, and his umbrella
organization, U.S. Inc., which raised funds for and directed the work of these
groups in their initial stages. “Three of the five directors of U.S. Inc. —
chairman John Tanton, vice-chair Mary Lou Tanton and director David Irish — are
openly committed to population control through abortion, family planning and
curtailing immigration,” writes Lopez.

But they are not alone. Lopez shows
interconnections between the anti-immigration leaders and the National Abortion
Rights Action League, Planned Parenthood, Pathfinder International, a provider
of abortions and sterilizations worldwide, and the International Projects
Assistance Service, which is the manufacturer of the Manual Vacuum Aspiration
Kit, a mobile abortion device used in the developing world. And there are past
and present connection between those involved in these anti-immigration groups
and the eugenics movement.

Longtime FAIR board member Garrett
Hardin was also a member of the American Eugenics Society, and FAIR has
received more than a million dollars in grants from the eugenicist organization
The Pioneer Fund.

Lopez asks why pro-life groups and
leaders have joined with FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA to promote the latters’
anti-immigration, anti-population agenda. It is a good question — one that GOP
members of Congress should ask themselves the next time they invite these
groups to present the case against comprehensive immigration reform at
hearings.

LINDA
CHAVEZ’S column is distributed by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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